Obama’s foreign-policy approval rating on the decline?

posted at 2:01 pm on September 19, 2012 by Erika Johnsen

On Tuesday, as the general assembly of that highly effective, morally righteous, and venerable body known as the United Nation convened to begin a new session, a State Department official took to the floor to describe how four years of President Obama’s leadership have strengthened America’s position in the eyes of the world. CNS News reports:

America today is “more respected, more engaged and more secure” than it was when President Obama came to office in early 2009, Assistant Secretary Esther Brimmer told an event at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. …

“At that time [January 2009], the United States faced serious questions about the future of our global engagement. We were deeply committed to two long and expensive wars, which hurt our ability to achieve other national goals and strained the fabric of global cooperation,” Brimmer said. …

“Since 2009, we’ve ended the war in Iraq, and U.S. troops in Afghanistan will draw down by 2014. In turning the page on a decade of war, the United States has expanded our pursuit of a smarter, more comprehensive engagement with the world, to better meet the challenges of the twenty-first century. …

Er, if you say so, but one of President Obama’s specific foreign-policy promises was to “reboot” America’s image in the Muslim world, but by at least one measure, America’s favorability in the Middle East is now a good deal lower than it was during President Bush’s time in office. And as for ending our two wars, it looks like President Obama’s [running-for-the-]exit strategy might not be going too well.

Whatever an executive branch official might say to the (wise, far-reaching, not-at-all corrupt) U.N., it seems that a week of chaos in the Middle East, highlighting the administration’s willingness to go wishy-washy on our First Amendment values and on security concerns at our embassies abroad, Americans are giving the results of Obama’s foreign policy a slightly more critical look than just the death of Osama bin Laden we heard so much about at the Democrats’ convention. According to a new WSJ/NBC poll:

The survey of 900 registered voters… found that 49% approved of Mr. Obama’s job performance on foreign affairs while 46% disapproved. That’s a 5 percentage point drop from the month before, and a 6 point rise in disapproval. The approval number stood at 49%, the first time it fell below 50% since April 2011, just before the president announced the death of Osama bin Laden.

The poll was conducted Sept. 12-16, and protesters first stormed the U.S. embassy in Cairo, Egypt, and the consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11.

The Obama administration’s handling of the Arab Spring may be coming back to bite them, in more than one way, and at a less-than-opportune moment.

America today is “more respected, more engaged and more secure” than it was when President Obama came to office in early 2009, Assistant Secretary Esther Brimmer told an event at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

As we all know, the ultimate sign of respect is when they kill your envoys.

Mitt Romney has now taken the lead in the swing state of New Hampshire. The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Likely Voters in New Hampshire shows Romney with 48% support to President Obama’s 45%. Read More:

I am convinced that there are dual worlds living side by side,,,,only one of which is real. I just cannot handle this pile of Nancy Pelosi that the Admin is trying to spin. If they really believe this BS, they are insane and if they know they are lieing, they are psycho,,,either way, we all lose.

America today is “more respected, more engaged and more secure” than it was when President Obama came to office in early 2009, Assistant Secretary Esther Brimmer told an event at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. …

When even Japan is beginning to doubt our commitment to that country, the word “respected” isn’t what comes to mind.

Besides Obama creating the worst economy since the great depression…
….his legacy will be that the jihadst have gained more power during his administration than at any time since the Ottoman Empire.

….now go ahead President “run for the exits”…..send some more of our troops to die in a war you have no intention of winning…..
…….a war that you have lost that will have seriously deadly consequences for the security of this Nation and Freedom around the world.

I would say yes, they were killed in the course of a terrorist attack on our embassy,” Matt Olsen, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said Wednesday at a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security Committee

It’s not exactly coherent and its deeply dangerous to the security of the US as Bolton has pointed out at length. But hey, if it feels good why the heck not? That’s the liberal mindset and we’re taking it worldwide baby. Oh yeah.

Breur being looked at for disciplinary actions. Holder ‘off the hook’?? Just the one guy resigned….Weinstein/Feinstein (sorry I was in another room when Megyn Kelly announded it. Fox is still going through the 500 pages.

Presidential foreign policy:
Teddy Roosevelt: Speak softly and carry a big stick.
Franklin Roosevelt: All we have to fear is fear itself.
Ronald Reagan: Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!
George W. Bush: You’re either with us or against us.
Barack Obama: Speak loudly and carry a white flag and a golf club.

“Since 2009, we’ve ended the war in Iraq, and U.S. troops in Afghanistan will draw down by 2014. In turning the page on a decade of war, the United States has expanded our pursuit of a smarter, more comprehensive engagement with the world, to better meet the challenges of the twenty-first century. …

Iraq and Obama’s kind of war in Afghanistan are a terrorist hotbed.

The Arab Spring is a monumental iceberg.

Egypt and Libya are the biggest ironies of the century.

The world has 30 countries on fire.

Sure, Liars. Goebbels loves you all.

Media, suffocate from eating this sh*t up. It ain’t Beluga caviar, you fools.

OT: 500 page Fast and Furious report released at 2pm. One DOJ official has already resigned.

faraway on September 19, 2012 at 2:08 PM

Not altogether OT, either. Fast and Furious was very bad foreign policy, resulting in at least 300 Mexicans killed by Obama’s gun-running. Could cause a further drop in foreign policy approval if it were known.

No, the seminar trolls’ roles are strictly regimented. Gumby handles all the horce-race poll threads. Every time one goes up, it’s a dog whistle for him to produce his suppress-the-vote talking points about how Mitt’s finished and Obama is relentlessly popular.

In 2007 and 2008, Barack Obama ran for president as a world citizen, multiracial and multicultural, created by nature and the Almighty to bring healing and peace to the world.

Muslims, Andrew Sullivan said, would see in his face a different America: “A brown-skinned man whose father was an African … who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close.”

It’s not his fault really. Who could have guessed that Islamists would hate having their leaders ignomiously hunted down with drones or that boasts of “I killed Osama” at the Democratic convention would incite them into some sort of rage?

One would assume they would chuckle at the antics of those wacky Americans, right?

Yes, his approval on Foreign Policy has fallen, a lot more than this poll suggests actually. Among independents, who made up only 16% of this poll, Obama was practically underwater on the Foreign Policy question. Had independents made a realistic portion of this poll, it would’ve been a far more dramatic drop in approval on this subject.

Yeah but he has taken Afghanistan from victory to, um nevermind. Maybe Iran, Libya, Syria, Egypt, arab spring, um no. What about Russia, yeah I guess not. Foreign policy is a racist dog whistle and I am shocked that Hot Gas would even entertain such a thread./

The most important media event of a very eventful week was, without doubt, Joe Klein’s appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. Klein came on the morning Americans learned four of its diplomats had been killed in Libya, and that the embassy in Cairo was besieged. Israel’s deputy speaker of the Knesset had been on earlier, trying to foment an American war against Iran.

Klein began by addressing Israeli efforts to ignite a war and meddle in the US elections, which he called “outrageous” and “disgusting”–like nothing he had seen in 40 years of journalism. It is worth interjecting here that Klein, now with Time, is no conventional liberal; I first came to know his work 20 years ago when he wrote for New York magazine and was–we at the very conservative NY Post editorial page understood–the one “mainstream” media figure most willing to tell truths uncongenial to the liberal narratives about the schools, or crime in the city, or New York City politics in general.

But more important than Klein’s unequivocal condemnation of Netanyahu’s warmongering and election meddling was his nuanced discussion of Iran, a subject which never receives other than one-dimensional treatment in the American mass media. Klein said several times that Iran was (in implicit contrast to the riotous cities of the Arab world) “a real country” with a highly-educated populace living in high rise apartments, not in tents. Nowhere in the world was there a greater mismatch between the population–sophisticated, somewhat pro-American–and the government. But the government, despite its anti-Americanism and fascist tendencies, was not crazy. All Iranians were under the influence of the dominant civil fact–that Iran took a million casualties in its decade-long war against Iraq, and wouldn’t risk a repeat of that.

Asked repeatedly by Morning Joe’s Donny Deutsch to say what would happen if we woke up one day next year to the news that Iran had, indeed, developed a bomb, Klein gave the kind of understated, lucid and factual answer that is so far removed from our present fevered discourse that it should probably be understood as an example of unusual courage: “It would provide protection for Iran against an Israeli attack or an American attack.” That might be an answer you would hear from an international relations specialist, or a top ranking military officer– but nowhere else before an American mass audience.

The entire segment bears watching, as it raises the question of why should Iran be our big number one enemy at all, period. A full history of the making of Iran into a major foe remains to be written, though it surely owes much to Israeli and neoconservative ideological machinations at the end of the Cold War, when Islam and the clash of civilizations was substituted for communism as our unifying source of all fears. If Iran’s nuclear program was rational and not the prologue to armageddon, and its people are sophisticated and pro-American, the obvious next question is whether Iran–as opposed to medieval Saudi Arabia for instance–needs to be treated as an enemy at all. During the segment Mike Barnicle chipped in to say that former senator Bob Kerrey speaks of Iran as “America’s most natural ally” in the Middle East. It is an argument made in the very interesting book Reset by Stephen Kinzer. It is worth recalling that Iran was the only place in the Middle East where there were spontaneous expressions of grief after 9/11–Teheran’s citizens took to the streets in candlelight vigils. In the months to follow, there was substantial intelligence cooperation between Iran and the US, as Washington went after Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. That was brought to halt, regrettably: The neocons in the Bush administration had a different agenda, and turned their attention to Iraq. And Iran after all was a potential rival to Israel’s military domination of the Middle East.

But looking at the fevered crowds whipped up throughout the Middle East (which are more or less absent in Teheran) it does raise the question of rapprochement. Klein has begun to sketch out a normative and cultural foundation for such an event. For TV newstalk, it was an exceptional moment.

But I mean, what the hell did we expect? Not only are the policies faulty, most notably in the Middle East, but the actors are neophytes with no skills or qualifications whatsoever. Dr. Utopia had no foreign policy/diplomatic background other than living in Indonesia as a kid, where he learned to eat dog and bow and pray at a mosque. Hillary knew and knows nothing about foreign affairs; she’s a stuffed pantsuit mouthing prepared remarks and attending functions, lying when it serves her interests and to cover her fat ass (they’re stonewalling on Benghazi, leading us to believe that she was directly involved). She’s got no more credentials to be in charge of foreign affairs than she had to represent NY in the Senate.

A great nation, a great power represented by such worthless hacks on the world stage. Teddy Roosevelt is spinning like a turboprop in his grave.

For a long time I’ve envisioned this scenario: With only a few months/weeks to go Barry sees no way he can get to 270 EVs and decides on The Nuclear Option–a full-fledged airstrike on the Iranian facilities in an attempt to win undecideds by proving his toughness. Never mind about abandoning Appeasement; he needs votes and he needs them now, and holding on to power takes priority over everything else.

Call it the Eat the Dog strategy (the official name will probably be something like “Operation Fluffy Princess”). Just enough to win Ohio and Florida. People are ignorant and gullible enough to do it, too.

For a long time I’ve envisioned this scenario: With only a few months/weeks to go Barry sees no way he can get to 270 EVs and decides on The Nuclear Option–a full-fledged airstrike on the Iranian facilities in an attempt to win undecideds by proving his toughness. Never mind about abandoning Appeasement; he needs votes and he needs them now, and holding on to power takes priority over everything else.

Call it the Eat the Dog strategy (the official name will probably be something like “Operation Fluffy Princess”). Just enough to win Ohio and Florida. People are ignorant and gullible enough to do it, too.

spiritof61 on September 19, 2012 at 3:02 PM

An October surprise massive strike on Iran is a win-win for Obama. It either get’s him the extra votes he needs to win reelection, or if he loses, leaves the worlds biggest mess for Romney to clean up.

Realists have long seen Obama for who he is: an individual with goals and beliefs that are contrary to our Constitution and our American national history.

Opposite to that are those who elected Obama because they found his ideas and performances enticing — “he’s ‘new'” — and those who continue to support him and by doing so, consider the Realists (see first paragraph) to be ‘just name-calling’ or otherwise, “haters” and then they fill in the blanks of why they think Realists view Obama as they do (“because he’s Black,” “you’re a racist” and whatever).

Because the Realists were and continue to be right about Obama: he IS a person with goals, beliefs and reasoning that is formed by political perspectives that are contrary to our Constitution and are distinctly oppositional or dismissive of our American Constitution and history (“we the people” having decided what throughout our history).

It’s tough to admit, for some that Obama isn’t “with” or “of” the USA — he may be citizen, educated here, but his formulative perspectives were made by anti-Constitutional influences and teachers.

For a long time I’ve envisioned this scenario: With only a few months/weeks to go Barry sees no way he can get to 270 EVs and decides on The Nuclear Option–a full-fledged airstrike on the Iranian facilities in an attempt to win undecideds by proving his toughness. Never mind about abandoning Appeasement; he needs votes and he needs them now, and holding on to power takes priority over everything else.

Call it the Eat the Dog strategy (the official name will probably be something like “Operation Fluffy Princess”). Just enough to win Ohio and Florida. People are ignorant and gullible enough to do it, too.

spiritof61 on September 19, 2012 at 3:02 PM

Obama has already proven, time and again, that he doesn’t respect restrictions on what he can do with and through the Office of the Presidency. He’s already violated his job duties AND restrictions based upon his emotional wants (most of those, not beneficial to this nation but satisfying to Obama’s wants and demands).

No one should be surprised if this behavior by him escalates before the November election — and if he loses, which I pray he does, after the election with greater abandon.

I’m always amazed that this president has any approval ratings over 15-20% on ANYthing. I certainly can’t think of any instances where Mr. President “shined” on foreign policy, much less deserving of an approval rating in the 40s. Maybe there’s some secret country out there that he brought peace and democracy and economic stability to that we just don’t know about. Or maybe there’s some vile dictator that was overthrown because of his policies? No? What is it then?

Yes. And that’s why I kind of understand the birthers suspicions. He acts anti-American so people are tempted to say hey! Maybe he’s from somewhere else.

Well, he is anti-American and he is also from here.

Kind of like Noam Chomsky with awesome pant-creases and a tingle blaster.

CorporatePiggy on September 19, 2012 at 3:47 PM

Well, he is anti-American and he is also from here.

My point is his mind — beliefs, ideas, goals, assumptions, wants and temper — are NOT “from here,” they’re molded by anti-Constitutionalist instructors.

Since you mention “the birthers,” the WHOLE POINT as to objections about Obama is just as I described in paragraph above here, that he’s NOT “natural born” — meaning, he may (or may not, since nothing’s been proven that he wass born here except his ongoing, pitiful forgeries) or may not have been “born here” BUT HE’S NOT “natural born”…

The whole NEED for “natural born” clause and condition for to be President is, in THEORY AND POLICY, as the Founding Fathers wrote it, that a President would NOT HAVE DIVIDED LOYALTIES, that they’d at least be of a second generation “American” or citizen and thus, have AT LEAST more cultural, political alignment with the nation and not with “foreign” locations via a foreign-citizen parent or residence or both.